Ongoing Projects

BTFDBB: BTF Database Bonn and Measurement Lab

The image-based acquisition of complex optical material properties is one of the major research topics in our group.
The goal of this project is the development of novel techniques for the efficient and high-fidelity capture of high-dimensional material representations like, e.g. the bidirectional texture function (BTF). Example data is publicy available at the BTF database Bonn.

Data-Driven Analysis and Synthesis of Bidirectional Texture Functions

In this project we strive to derive a statistical model of the space spanned by a database of measured BTFs. This way, we intend to develop a dramatically more general representation of materials than is currently available. The goal is to reparameterize the high-dimensional material space to allow perceptually meaningful interpolations between the acquired samples, i.e., to generate new materials that blend qualities of samples from the dataset.

Completed Projects

EPOCH - European Network of Excellence in Open Cultural Heritage

EPOCH is a network of about a hundred European cultural institutions joining their efforts to improve the quality and effectiveness of the use of Information and Communication Technology for Cultural Heritage.
Participants include university departments, research centres, heritage institutions, such as museums or national heritage agencies, and commercial enterprises, together endeavouring to overcome the fragmentation of current research in this field.

RealReflect

The RealReflect project’s goal is to increase the realism of Virtual Reality (VR) technology by developing physically correct visualization technology capable of accounting for phenomena like metamerism, fluorescence and light polarization and integrating it into an existing VR system. This will enable users from many different areas like automotive industry or architecture to create VR simulations for the interior design, thereby avoiding the necessity to build expensive real prototypes which reduces costs as well as time to market of the overall end products.